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The Fight In Iraq: Yes, It Was Worth It To Fight Terrorists

Our “illustrious” Vice President, Joe Biden (he who is afflicted with both hoof-in-mouth disease and has no functioning brain), said that America’s fight in Iraq wasn’t worth the “horrible price” while attempting to have the Obama administration take full credit for its success. I’m assuming Winston Smith, from within the Ministry of Truth, was feeding Biden these lines. There is no sense rebutting Smith Biden’s crap here since former Vice President Dick Cheney did a nice job of doing so.

No matter how much people want to say Iraq was a distraction from our real fight with Al Qaeda, the reality is, in fact, overthrowing Saddam Hussein had as much to do with fighting Al Qaeda, albeit indirectly, as it does with taking out Osama bin Laden. Politically speaking it was the right thing to do, especially as it relates to national security. Biden’s statement is just one more in a long line of misleading and false statements from Democrats and the leftists about what Iraq was about. Allow me to explain. It’s long but I think well worth your time to read it.

We know that Hussein didn’t have anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But did that justify an invasion of Iraq and including it as part of the greater war against Al Qaeda? Absolutely. We know Hussein used terrorists to fight his proxy war against whomever he wanted. We know that Al Qaeda had a presence in Iraq; whether Hussein or his government had much contact with them at the time we invaded is immaterial since such collaboration was bound to come about (history is replete with examples of rivals joining forces to unite against a common enemy). Hussein tried to assassinate the first President Bush. Hussein started two wars and was directly responsible for the death of at least a million (and probably closer to two million) people. Hussein used WMDs and showed an inclination to find more. And finally, the left likes to lie about President George W. Bush lying about Hussein having WMDs, even though it was actually Saddam Hussein who did the actual lying (don’t you just love the left’s ability to project?).

Lefties claim there was no legal justification for Bush to invade Iraq, and have even cited the convictions of members of the Nazi and Japanese governments of inciting World War II as a reason to prosecute President Bush. But to keep with the legal aspect, this argument is utterly false. It wasn’t Bush who started the war, but Hussein himself a dozen years earlier when he had invaded Kuwait in order to conquer it. Every charge that convicted the WWII aggressors applied to Hussein. Unfortunately, the coalition decided that the only goal, a political one at that, was to liberate Kuwait, which was done quickly and brilliantly. However, not only did this mean that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have to face justice for his actions, Hussein would remain as dictator of Iraq. Even the sanctions imposed on Iraq weren’t anything approaching the kind of punishment that had been meted out to those who started WWII. Worse, Hussein made it a point over the next dozen years to undermine or ignore those sanctions. If there was any further justification for the latter President Bush to invade Iraq, that was it. But you’ll never here any of this from those who made a political decision, relying on false legalese, to oppose the war. That most assuredly includes Barack Obama and his hypocritical Vice President Joe Biden.

In fact, the notion that legal reasoning needs to be provided to justify aggression is demonstrably false in the first place. Wars are not legal acts but political acts (read Clausewitz). To prove it, we only need to go back to WWII. The Nazis and the Japanese were rightly blamed for starting it. But there weren’t any members of the Italian government under the regime of Benito Mussolini who were brought before the Nuremburg tribunals, those who assisted Il Duce initiate their war on Ethiopia and later against France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union (Mussolini was to see justice by being summarily executed by his own people just before the Nazis surrendered). And lest we forget, the Soviet Union not only invaded Poland to assist the Nazi conquest of that country, but Stalin also invaded Finland in order to reclaim it as a part of the Soviet Union (Finland had been a part of the Russian Empire, but had declared, and maintained, its independence after the Communist Revolution; despite being somewhat allied with the Nazis, Finland was able to keep its independence after WWII, although it did cede some territory and pay reparations to the Soviet Union). Then, of course, there are the invasions of Iran and Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.

This isn’t to say that a war can’t be waged to bring dictators like Hussein to justice. But all that language to use the law to justify the invasion went out the door in 1991 when President George H. W. Bush made the political decision to end Operation Desert Storm and keep Hussein in power in Iraq. It was just as much a political decision to get Hussein out of Kuwait as it was to stop the offensive. The only thing keeping that President Bush and President Clinton from bringing Hussein to trial for the criminal act of initiating a war of aggression was the political will to do it, something neither President showed an inkling of. As events proved, it wasn’t above the tyrannical regimes of Middle East countries to use proxies, terrorists, to continue a fight. As I had stated earlier, I have no doubt that had Hussein or his sons remained in power, there would have been a quasi-alliance between that government and bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

With the legal aspect put to bed, was the latter President Bush justified in invading Iraq a second time? There were plenty of political reasons justifying it, along with the fact that a Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq was detrimental to the national security of the United States, especially after 9/11. In fact, it was, in my opinion, a brilliant act of grand strategy. Iran should have been further isolated than it was, being in between Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria, being bordered by U.S. allies Turkey, Israel, and Jordan, along with a presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, should have been brought to its knees, along with its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Bush’s move to ally the U.S. with India could also be used as a guarantee of Pakistani assistance. So what went wrong?

Great military grand strategy still relies on successful strategic goals and tactical execution; it’s what kept the WWII assault on Normandy from becoming a replay of the WWI fiasco at Gallipoli. Tactically speaking, U.S. troops always performed brilliantly in Iraq; they still do. One problem was the strategy of what to do in Iraq and the Bush administration took awhile before finding something that would work. I’m old-fashioned; I would have made it a point to secure the southern oil fields and impose an interim government along the lines of what was established by General Douglas MacArthur in Japan following WWII, keeping Iraq under martial law until it was no longer necessary.

But the real problem was back here in the U.S.; the ability of the left, Democrats, and their spokesmen and women in the lame-stream media to dominate the discussion with obfuscation and outright lies. Their attempts to turn the war in Iraq into some kind of legal issue is nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to redefine what war actually is. The left’s use of projection is astounding: Saddam Hussein was the aggressor, so now George W. Bush became the aggressor; Hussein lies about having WMDs, so now George W. Bush lied about Hussein having WMDs. It didn’t end there; Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) claimed that Hussein was an imminent threat to U.S. national security, so it became attributed to the Bush administration. Then there were those Democrats who voted for the Bush administration’s use of military force against Hussein, like now-Vice President Biden, who turned on their own government and country when it was politically expedient to do so.

What Biden has said isn’t new; it’s something he and the Obama administration have been trying to do since the 2008 Presidential campaign, falsely taking credit for success in Iraq. But the idea that the Bush administration took it’s eye off the ball in Afghanistan is ludicrous. That is akin to saying FDR didn’t concentrate on beating the real aggressors against the U.S. during WWII, the Japanese. After all, while Hitler did declare war on the U.S., he was in no position to stop any U.S. assault considering he was battling the British in North Africa and had the lion’s share of his forces fighting the Red Army (the day before Pearl Harbor, Hitler had called off the initial offensive that had started nearly six months earlier and the Nazis were in full retreat). The number of U.S. troops that were involved with both the invasions of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944 could have been used earlier to successfully hit the Japanese military in multiple places at the same time instead of piecemeal assaults on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, the Philippines, and the islands of the central Pacific. After dusting off Japan, theoretically, U.S. troops could then have been sent to Europe to battle the Nazis. Naturally, hindsight has the advantage of not actually being involved in what was going on. For anyone who has studied WWII, FDR was absolutely right in determining that beating the Nazis had to be the priority for the U.S., especially after the U.S. Navy sent four of Japan’s six carriers to the bottom of the Pacific at the Battle of Midway. Returning to Iraq, Biden’s statement about Bush ignoring Afghanistan was stupid, pointless, and only done for personal political gain, and with a complete disregard to the U.S. war effort and its effects on the troops.

The Left, the Democrats, and their minions in the media have thrown every argument to try to tear down America’s effort in Iraq, especially when it came to taking out Saddam Hussein. Despite what these people say, the American effort against Hussein was a political act because that is what wars are. Plus, it was done in order to strengthen national security. The left and the Democrats used politics as well; they used politics to tear down their opponents, the war effort, and to undermine national security, simply to gain power. As you can see, it is disgusting, as opposed to the politics that led the U.S. to war in Iraq.

Now we have the Vice President getting his talking points directly from the Ministry of Truth.